Time Out’s list of the 50 greatest animated films, curated by Terry Gilliam, shows a large number of films from Studio Ghibli, including the top film! These are good times fo Ghibli, at least in Spain:

• Ponyo on the cliff was broadly played during the summer an has just been released on DVD, as is Whisper of the Heart (#21).
• Totoro (#1) is being shown in some cinemas (ok, only two in the city of Madrid), and the DVD is due on December 9th.

Ghibli movies in the list:

• 1. My Neighbour Totoro (1988)
• 6. Spirited Away (2001)
• 12. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
• 21. Whisper of the Heart (1995)
• 26. Princess Mononoke (1997)
• 30. Porco Rosso (1992)

You can find the complete list below, with links to Time Out reviews (when provided by them).

This is the list. As all lists, it can be quite controversial. Nevertheless, I think all of the films belong to the list, except the ones with [*]. For these, I strongly disagree their placement (remember, it’s the best 50 animated movies ever!).

1. My Neighbour Totoro (1988)
2. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) (1937!!!)
3. The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979)
4. Fantasia (1940)
5. Toy Story (1995)
6. Spirited Away (2001)
7. Yellow Submarine (1968)
8. Belleville Rendez-vouz (2003)
9. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)
10. Robin Hood (1973)
11. Bambi (1942)
12. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
13. Dumbo (1941)
14. Gandahar (1988)
15. The Iron Giant (1999)
16. Akira (1988)
17. The Brave Little Toaster (1987)
18. The Jungle Book (1967)
19. When the Wind Blows (1988)
20. Pinocchio (1940)
21. Whisper of the Heart (1995)
22. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) & Coraline (2009)
23. Perfect Blue (1997)
24. The Incredibles (2004) [*]
25. Watership Down (1978)
26. Princess Mononoke (1997)
27. ‘Antz‘ v ‘A Bug’s Life’ (both 1998)
28. Persepolis
29. The Secret of NIMH (1982)
30. Porco Rosso (1992)
31. WALL-E (2008)
32. Kirikou and the Sorceress
33. Aladdin (1992)
34. Ghost in the Shell (1995)
35. Beavis and Butt-head Do America (1996)
36. The Lord of the Rings (1978)
37. A Soldier’s Tale (1984)
38. Ratatouille (2007)
39. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theatres
40. Animal Farm (1954)
41. FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992)
42. Fritz the Cat (1972)
43. Happy Feet (2006)
44. Waking Life (2001) / A Scanner Darkly (2006)
45. Transformers – The Movie (1986)
46. Paprika
47. Sleeping Beauty (1959)
48. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within [*]
49. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (2009)
50. Heavy Metal (1981)

Some films missing, in my opinion:

• Vampiros en la Habana, the best animated movie in Spanish I’ve ever watched.
• Ghibli’s Kiki’s delivery service, Castle in the sky, at least (perhaps, Nausicaä, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo).
• Disney/Pixar’s Monsters Inc, Lilo & Stitch

A quick look back to some groups that got bunched into the “Nuevo Rock Americano”, at least in Spain. They had some things in common, at least the ones at the top of  the list… but others were clearly misplaced (The Cramps).

A highlight of this period: a song that was a great success back then: The Long Ryders’ Looking for Lewis and Clark. I mean, it was the only decent song that played in the sorry places I used to visit when I was young. I still love the A-G-Em riff, really dramatic (due to the “m”, of course).

OK, in order to be NRA you have to be: New, Rock, American, and not punk/hardcore (but, see exceptions below), certainly not commercial (i.e., not AOR). Ideally, you should sound like Neil Young, the Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers, etc.

A list of groups I recall:

• The Long Ryders. They were good, if clearly not the best. The comply with all the requisites (see the “y” in the name!). A(nother) song: A want you bad.
• Green on Red. I own a vynil copy of their Gas, Food, Lodging. Very nice, straight rock. Song: Hair of the dog.
• The del Fuegos. Similar. A nice song: Nervous and shacky.
• REM. That’s right, their success has ecclipsed their initial placing in this bin. Their first LP, Murmur, was a bit too psychedelic, but their second, Fables from the Reconstruction, is quite folk-country and clearly NRA-ish. Song: Dedicated to the one I love.
• The Smithereens. OK, they are as power-pop as can be, but they were placed in there. Song: Blood and Roses. Also, don’t miss their tribute albums to The Beatles, available in Spotify (specially since there are no Beatles songs there).
• The Violent Femmes. Didn’t we say not punkish? But see, the guys used acoustic instruments, so there you go. Song, need I say this, Blister in the Sun. An anthem!
• The Cramps. Ditto. The guys used old influences (from the 50’s, actually), so there. Song: The human fly.
• The Dream Syndicate. Yet another project that was mainly punk. Placed here perhaps given the strong Velvet Underground/Lou Reed influence (and, they wore plain clothes). Song: Tell me when it’s over.

Sorry for the omisions!

It turns out one of the best features of the Microsoft Vista OS is its intense checking on itself. Performance is carefully monitored. Of course, this results in lower performance…

Anyway, here is a summary of things I have learned trying to calm down my mysteriously busy laptop.

The case: My sony vaio was never too fast, but a week ago it really started to get busy. The HD light was on constantly, and the CPU was clearly high. Even it wasn’t doing much, according to the list of processes.

Some solutions: First, the process list (like “top” in linux) can be brought up with the right button on the task bar (no need for the silly blue screen that appears with ctrl+alt+supr). The CPU numbers are meaningless, afaik. The “performance” tab is a bit better, but still no information of HD activity. What is really helpful is the program that shows when the “advanced” button (or something) is clicked (admin privileges are required from now on).

The main performance information window is quite cool, with graphs of the main system activities, and expandable sections for each. In my case, the HD section lists tasks that are using the drive, and what file they are using (either writing or reading). That’s very helpful, and not so easily available in linux, afaik (on the other hand, I can only remember one case in which I would have needed this under linux, that’s when the updatedb program indexes the disks and the systems gets quite busy).

Now, sorting the “read” or “write” columns reveals the main offenders. In my case: the SuperFetch and Search_whatyoucallit indexing services, as many people have pointed out. And also, “windows error reporting”, WER, a program that collects performance info and sends it to Redmond (it seems). This nice piece of sofware may cause CPU usage to go up and down in a chaotic-like fashion, and HD to collapse.

Once identifyed, these services can be stopped for good. The easiest way is to use Control Panel (classic view) -> admin tools -> services. Those services should be stopped, and prevented from ever showing up by turning their status to “manual”.

Here is what, for many, is a weak point in wikipedia: the sources. What is accepted as “true”. Here is a list of claims that may have been challenged in wikipedia, or not. See how many you get right!

• About the katakana Japanese syllabary:  in a manga, the speech of a foreign character or a robot may be represented by, for example, コンニチワ konnichiwa (“hello”) instead of the more usual hiragana こんにちは.
• About Hugo_Stiglitz (a character in Inglourious_Basterds): Fittingly, the character’s guitar riff theme is taken from Slaughter, a blaxploitation movie starring Jim Brown.
• In the article about the film Watchmen: Classical music excerpts include Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in a Vietnam battle (a reference to Apocalypse now) and Mozart’s Requiem at the resolution in Antarctica.
• Getting serious:  In the article about the well-known D’Alembert’s_paradox of hydrodynamics: Recently the following alternative resolution of d’Alembert’s paradox was claimed ^[7][8][9] … This is a different resolution from that by Prandtl and it is claimed to be supported by both theory, computation and experiment. Notice that Refs. 7, 8, and 9 correspond to two articles in peer-reviewed journals and a book published by Springer!

Answers

• Of course, millions of people know Japanese and read manga, so a source is not provided.
• Of course, dozens of people know about mexploitation, blaxploitation and Jim Brown. So, this claim can be read in the current article, with no reference whatsoever (!).
• Of course, millions of people know this music, it being Wagner’s and Mozart’s (and not too obscure pieces!). But see, technically that was just my opinion (that’s right, that was my little grain of sand, see the old entry). I did not provide a reliable source, so it was deleted. See the comment on my talk page.
• This is serious stuff: see a summary of the controversy. Despite the strong support for this claim, it seems all reference to this line of work is being systematically deleted! Among the abundant discussion, one reads things like: I find your claim as to the prestige of the journal surprising. It was started in 1999. Is a publication in that journal the pinnacle of the subject of fluid mechanics? I don’t think so. Perhaps to give me an idea…what is its impact factor? OK, so we are now talking impact factor in order a article published in a peer-reviewed journal be taken as a serious source? What’s next, something along “yeah, but that’s a Phys. Rev. E, not a Phys. Rev. Lett.“?

To summarize: I think the lack of a clear definition of when to use a reliable source, and what constitutes one, is a serious problem in the wikipedia project. Not an easy one, I am aware, but I think not even including references to controversial approaches, like in the last example, is definitely going too far.

Quick and dirty, I was going to write, but the output is quite nice, actually.

My advice, in a nutshell: use the a0poster class. Then, modify the poster.tex file in Andrea’s site.

First, some history: I was about the first in my department to try to compose a scientific poster with LaTeX. I basically used lots of boxes, and it was a matter of using tables to align them. A bit of a pain, since LaTeX is best when one does not want complete control on the final outcome. My poster was used a template for several posters done at my department, despite its flaws.

Recently, I was in a hurry to compose a new one, and I had lost access to my files. Fortunately, a google search for a0poster yields Andrea’s site. The tex file there is really useful. There are two options, I have just tried the one that seemed simple, using multicols. You just write stuff and it gets nicely placed in three columns. Figures (and refs to them) are supported, as are citations, even BiBTeX. If the data is already at hand (as is usually the case, e.g. from a previous paper), a nice poster can be composed in just a few hours!

I was recently quite shocked by Disney’s dubbing of  Hayao Miyazaki’s movies, specially   (Castle in the Sky (Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (Majo no takkyûbin). These are widely held as masterpieces in animation, so that they would seem to deserve special care. On the other hand, they fall in dangerous “children’s territory”. Some may be isolated in the dubbing process:

• Translation, which is bound to introduce variations. Unfortunately, this will apply to subtitles also, unless they are used as visual aids to the listening. (In my case, this holds for English movies, certainly not for Japanese ones.)
• Voice acting. For Miyazaki’s, and other movies from Studio Ghibli, this has been also criticized. In my opinion, the acting is usually excellent, and performed by top-notch actors: Anna Paquin, Elle and Dakota Fanning (cute to have sisters dubbing fictional sisters), Janeane Garofalo, Phil Hartman, Kirsten Dunst …
• Adaptation. This is the part where I was shocked.

Adaptation would concern the question of what to dub in order to adapt the movie to a different audience (also, the musical soundtrack). It seems in order to Westernize these movies:

• completely new dialog is inserted, often to fill “empty” sequences (the usual Western horror vacui)
• same with music score: just as in stores, it seems some music must be playing, or else we, poor Westerners, get bored
• “foreign” features (humour, cultural references) are altered or eliminated
• some characters acquire new personalities

Don’t be to quick about taking the easy way and blame Disney for it all.  Studio Ghibli has carefully supervised the dubbing, and Miyazaki himself seems to have approved it. My very personal (and perhaps wrong) explanation is that the Japanese are trying their best to adapt a product to a “new” market.

But, they are wrong: people, and very specially children, should be open to new ways of storytelling, and be exposed to a sensibility different to the predominant one. That’s what I think, at least, and that’s what I am trying to do, even if my kids have to endure the original Japanese and I have to do all the reading…

What follows is extracted from wikipedia articles on Castle in the Sky and Kiki’s Delivery Service, with my comments. See also my book about Studio Ghibli (nice feature, wikipedia books.)

Castle in the Sky

• A significant quantity of background chatter and one-liners were added (even more so than in Disney’s dub of Kiki’s Delivery Service), filling in moments of silence and increasing the frenetic effect of certain scenes.

This is just amazing. In the first sequence, the pirates just keep chatting and talking like mad because, of course, we have to hear what they are saying (even from 100 meters away), we need to be told what they are planning (the tension!). Of course, music should be playing because we can’t stand old, boring, wind howling. Then, I switched to Japanese and never went back.

• Composer Joe Hisaishi was commissioned to rework and extend his original synthesizer-composed 37-minute soundtrack into a 90-minute piece for symphony orchestra in an effort to make the film more accessible to US audiences who are accustomed to a more substantial musical accompaniment.

The same thing here. I absolutely loved the landing in the Castle, when after the storm not a single sound is heard (ok, I did check the audio to make sure that was on purpose). It seems we Westerners cannot stand silence.

• Pazu and Sheeta, as portrayed by James Van Der Beek and Anna Paquin, are made to sound as several years older, placing them in their mid-teens, rather than their pre-teens.

Why oh why? They are still so clearly children!

• Several modifications were made to dialogue spoken to/about Sheeta by members of the Dola gang, including a declaration of love from one of the pirates. In the original Japanese version, the dialogue presented Sheeta as a potential mother figure for the pirates, instead of a potential romantic interest.

Thereby destroying the charm of the Dola gang’s boys, who are pictured as big children (similarly to the pirates in Porco Rosso).

• References to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island were removed, as was the reference to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

… Words fail me. So, the movie is originally called “Laputa: Castle in the Sky”, an explicit homage to Swift, but then the reference is dropped! The beautiful reference to Treasure Island (easily, my favourite adventure book) is also gone. If this is not dumbing down kids, I don’t know what is.

(Incidentally, the word “Laputa” dropped from the title, too, but that’s due to the word sounding so ugly in the Spanish language.)

Kiki

The character of the cat Jiji changed slightly. In the Japanese version, Jiji is voiced by a female performer, while in the American version Jiji has a more distinct male voice — possibly for fear audiences would think he is female, until he develops a romantic interest in the white Persian cat living nearby — and also has more of a wisecracking demeanor. In Japanese culture, cats are usually depicted with feminine voices, whereas in American culture their voices are more gender-specific.

OK, this is a change I can live with. The assumed default gender for animals is always troublesome (why do you call a squirrel “she”? an American friend once asked us.)

In the original Japanese script, Jiji loses his ability to communicate with Kiki permanently, but in the American version a line is added that implies he is able to speak (or she to understand him) again. Miyazaki has said that Jiji is the immature side of Kiki, and this implies that Kiki, by the end of the original Japanese version, has matured beyond talking to her cat.

This is outrageous, changing the ending of the movie. I don’t think this was done so much as to keep a completely happy ending (the ending is quite happy as it is, as tends to be the case with Miyasaki-san), but to leave everything explained. It seems at the end of the movie, everything must be nice and clear, and no room for interpretation (such as the one the author provides) should be left. This is in contrast with many other movies, such as My Neighbor Totoro, where numerous questions are left open.

Update: Unbelievable: I found out the Spanish dubbing spoils one of the most touching scenes in Kiki’s. When she returns from her first delivery, she finds a delivery sign on the bakery’s window, made out of bread. We watch from the outside as she goes inside, inquires Osono about it, then hugs her husband, the baker. No sound is needed in this marvelous scene… but Spanish translators seem to think otherwise – we are therefore able to hear the superfluous dialog (from outside the shop!), lest out little heads miss something: “Who made this sign?”, “Well, my husband did!”, etc…

This is a summary of what I understood about the substitute dominant from a conversation with my colleague Rafael Delgado Buscalioni, who is proficient in music theory. The idea is how to build “another” dominant chord. Say we have a regular, major C chord: C-E-G. The dominant is G major: G-B-D. A typical choice is to include the subdominant in the later, thus adding tension – this leads us to the dominant seventh, G7: G-B-D-F. (this is the way 7th chords entered Western music, it seems!).

By keeping the “tension” notes, we are led to the Secondary dominant, Db7: Db-F-Ab-B.

This is why:

Let us keep, as said above, the “tension” notes:  B (the subtonic, signaling an impending return to the tonic.) and F (the 7th of G). But, let’s reverse them, so that F is the major third on the new chord, and B its 7th (we want to keep a 7th chord).

The outcome can only be one: Db7, which indeed runs Db7-F-?-B, the unknown note being a sweetly dissonant Ab, present in a C-E cadence, as in Buffalo Springfield’s Burned (“now you’s running away…”) or Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright: C-E-F-Dm. It’s also interesting that Db7 an G are separated by a tritone , and so are B and F! (Sooner or later, everyone ends up mentioning tritones in jazz harmony.)

This sound really well in jazz and bossa. Try, for example, instead of a C-Am-G7 cadence, a C-Am-Db7 one. Or, instead of C-A-D-G7, C-A-D-Db7.

Moreover, for reasons I have partly forgotten, the chord should be extended with an E: Db-F-Ab-B-E,  producing the very jazzy Db7#9.

A demolishing opinion about Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded: (Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America):

All this gear is so intelligent, in fact, that “when the sun is shining brightly and the wind is howling” (i.e., when your house is generating solar and wind power), your utility turns on your dryer to finish your laundry.

Does it ever occur to him, in the grip of a fantasia like this, that if the sun is shining brightly, or the breeze is blowing steadily, you could dry your clothes on a $14 piece of rope strung off your back deck, or for that matter on a foldable rack in the apartment hallway? And that since most of the world already knows how to do it, we might be smarter moving in their direction instead of insisting that they buy into our entire high-technology suburban dream?

By Bill McKibben, full text here.

Many issues of this most amazing journal, The New York Review of Books (which deserves an entry on its own) end up in my house thanks to my father paper subscription. It seems some articles, such as the one quoted, are in the public domain, at least as of today.

About the only problem I have with my OpenSUSE 11.1 on my desktop PC at work is the ATI graphic card configuration. Each time I upgrade the kernel I have to rebuild the module again, so I enclose here a list of steps that seem to work fine. I have taken these from pongaunagujeronegroensuvida.

1. Obtain the latest ATI drivers, some large file named “ati-driver-installer-9.2-x86.x86_64.run” or similarly.
2. Go to text mode (su -; init 3).
3. Run it as a superuser (su – ; sh ati-driver… etc ), select direct install.
4. Run aticonfig –initial -f
5. Try aticonfig –overlay-type=Xv, although it may do nothing.
6. Run sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx. Hopefully, it will present a X valid config screen; say “OK”.
7. Reboot normaly.
8. Each time the kernel is upgraded: reboot in secure mode, the X server will fail, but press crtl+atl+F1, go to step 3.

Just a list of The Onion articles about science that I find funny:

• Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics, a fundamental scientific principle stating that entropy increases over time as organized forms decay into greater states of randomness, has come under fire from conservative Christian groups, who are demanding that the law be repealed.
• Bush Finds Error In Fermilab Calculations. President Bush met with members of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory research team Monday to discuss a mathematical error he recently discovered in the famed laboratory’s “Improved Determination Of Tau Lepton Paths From Inclusive Semileptonic B-Meson Decays” report.
• National Science Foundation: Science Hard. The National Science Foundation’s annual symposium concluded Monday, with the 1,500 scientists in attendance reaching the consensus that science is hard.
• World’s Top Scientists Ponder: What If The Whole Universe Is, Like, One Huge Atom? Gathering for what members of the international science community are calling “potentially the most totally out-to-lunch freaky head trip since Einstein postulated that space and time were, like, curved and shit,” a consortium of the world’s top physicists descended upon Stanford University Monday to discuss some of the difficult questions facing the cutting edge of theoretical thinking.
• Raving Lunatic Obviously Took Some Advanced Physics… “Where’s my cheese? Don’t take my rowboat! Got no room!” the lunatic screamed from his regular spot near the Campus Drive bus stop. “I need space! Gimme space! Infinite dimensional separable Hilbert space!”.
• Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory. As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
• High-School Science Teacher Takes Fun And Excitement Out Of Science. Verona High School ninth-grade science teacher Mark Randalls has a unique talent for taking the fun and magic out of science, students of his comprehensive survey class reported Tuesday.

Addendum

Britney Spears .ac, including Britney Spears’ Guide to Semiconductor Physics, with articles such as Semiconductor Transport: The Einstein Relations.